Brexfactor: A Liddle knowledge is a dangerous thing

Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins

‘What’s not to like here?’ was nicotine-stained fanboy Farage’s verdict on potty-mouthed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, posted on Twitter on July 27. On July 28, Hatey Katie weighed in with ‘Love @Scaramucci – sod apologising. If only all communications were so robust.’

Alas for them both, the answer to ‘what’s not to like here?’ proved to be ‘Anthony Scaramucci’, who was sacked by Donald Trump on July 31.

Steve Crowther

The caretaker captain of the Titanic, aka interim UKIP leader Crowther, sent members a Partridgesque letter begging for funds. Headlined ‘I appeal to you’, the first line read ‘…or maybe I don’t but the good news is you don’t have to put up with me for very long!’ A-ha!

Crowther wrote ‘we got pasted on May 4th and June 8th… understandably we’re strapped for cash… can you spare us a tenner or two?’

He signed off with a cringeworthy ‘Yours Brexitively, Steve Crowther.’ But it seems the ‘Kippers don’t have much to be Brexitive about…

Rod Liddle

‘There is not the slightest evidence that the mood of the country has changed regarding our leaving the EU,’ wrote hulking controversialist Liddle in his Spectator column. Not the slightest evidence, apart from the results of the last seven major opinion polls on the subject, only one of which has shown a majority for Leave.

The same piece poked fun at Remainer Matthew Parris for saying the Tories would win a landslide at the last general election. Worth then remembering Liddle’s predictions – ‘the Tories will increase their majority, but not by very much. The Lib Dems will gain a dozen or so seats. Labour will suffer’ – all of which were entirely vindicated on June 8.

Kate Hoey

Labour’s Brexity Vauxhall MP continues to disprove the theory that once you’ve been photographed laughing it up on a boat with Nigel Farage, the only way to go is up.

Hoey tweeted a link to an article on alt-right site Breitbart about shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner’s opposition to the single market, telling London’s Evening Standard it was a ‘useful update’. No word yet on whether she’ll also approvingly share other Breitbart exclusives, like ‘There’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews’ and ‘Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy’.

Boris Johnson

Australia got a lesson in how truth works in Borisland when the Foreign Secretary told to Sydney audiences that he was ready to send ‘two new colossal aircraft carriers’ to the South China Sea in order to ease fears about Chinese militarisation and island-building.

Pressed on this in a Q&A, Johnson conceded ‘We haven’t yet quite decided to do that. OK?’ It later emerged that the carriers wouldn’t reach the region until 2020 and 2023 at the earliest… presumably painted red and carrying a promise to give the Aussie navy an extra £350m a week.

Neil Rix

‘I want to put the great back in Britain,’ declared the Brexiteer mayor of Dover after last year’s referendum. This week the scaffolding firm owner unveiled part of his plan to do just that – by asking the council to replace his civic car, a Toyota Prius, with a larger vehicle which reflects the ‘prestige and status’ of his role.

On true Brit Rix’s list of suggested replacements are the Outlander PHEV made by Japan’s Mitsubishi, a Superb Hatch SE l Executive from Czech firm Skoda or a S90 hybrid T8 twin, made by Sweden’s Volvo.

Prison Planet Paul

Alt-right British blogger Paul Joseph Watson of the Prison Planet website humiliated himself when he complained that a BBC schools cartoon about Roman Britain, aimed at seven-year-olds, should not have included black characters.

Mike Stuchbery dismantled him in a series of tweets, pointing out that ‘occupying legions were drawn from other parts of the Empire’, that ‘provincial governors posted to Britannia would take slaves with them & some would have been gifted freedom’ and that there is evidence of Iraqi & Syrian soldiers being at Hadrian’s Wall. But then Mike is only a historian and former teacher, so what would he know about it?

Nadine Dorries

The Tory MP for Mid-Bucks, who wept in public when Boris Johnson quit the leadership race, has been looking back at her idol’s glory days as mayor. ‘London couple just told me that since Boris left, London has become a scarier city, feel as though they are living in midst of crime wave,’ she tweeted, adding that in the 1990s, before BoJo took over from Ken ‘Hitler’ Livingstone, air pollution in the city was so bad ‘wearing a face mask was the norm’.

Could the London couple perhaps have been Boris and Mrs Boris Johnson? Was Nadine’s research on face masks entirely carried out at raves featuring Altern-8? Did all the masks get stolen in the crime wave?

Sir James Dyson

The Brexit-backing ‘vacuum disruptor’ is warning the government not to cut subsidies to farmers once Britain leaves the EU. Perhaps not coincidentally, he owns the biggest total farming estate in the UK and last year received £1.6million from the Basic Payments Scheme, part of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Of course there is one simple way to ease Sir James’ fears about British farmers facing a competitive disadvantage against their EU counterparts. We could stay in the EU.

You Gov’s Leavers

We’re repeatedly told not to view those who voted Leave as selfish and obsessive. Yet how else to explain the extraordinary YouGov poll of 2,043 Leavers which reveals that 61% of them would consider ‘significant damage to the British economy to be a price worth paying for taking Britain out of the EU’? Another 39% of Leavers said the loss of a family member’s job, or even their own, would be a price worth paying for their lovely Brexit.

By contrast, 61% of Remain voters said it would not be worth losing their job or that of a family member to stay in the EU. And 64% of Remainers said they would not consider significant damage to the UK economy to be a price worth paying to teach Brexiteers a lesson. Could it be that we are just nicer people than them?